It has been couple of years since the 30kWh battery packs were released. I was wondering what the consensus on battery degradation is of these battery packs. I have seen various references to this 30 kWh packs being less durable than the lizard packs. My friend has a 50K miles lizard pack on his '15 and he is running with 12 bars and he charges to 100% every single time. Sometimes twice a day due to his commute needs. Any ideas how the '16 and '17 will behave over the next 5-10 years? Is there empirical data to suggest these newer packs are prone to early degradation?

I've only got a sample of one on my '16 S30. Having said, I have had it for almost 2 years now and it's performance in terms of reliability and degradation has been comparable to the '13 SV24 it replaced. Yes, I live in an EV friendly place, and I seldom QC - so the car lives an easy life. My single data point does not support the rapid degradation claim, but long term reliability will obviously require a longer time line of data than exists right now.

On June 6, 2018 Nissan began conducting a customer service campaign in North America to reprogram the lithium-ion battery controller in 2016 and 2017 model-year LEAF vehicles equipped with a 30 kWh battery, to correct the calculation used for the battery capacity level gauge and distance remaining of the vehicle.

The displayed vehicle range and battery capacity level gauge on these vehicles is displaying range and capacity that is lower than the actual amount. Reprogramming the controller will result in an accurate display of the LEAFs battery capacity and trip range.

In most cases the 30 kWh battery has been just fine, but in other cases the battery controller was providing inaccurate calculated data that falsely indicated that the battery was degrading at an accelerated rate. Some cars were reporting losing as much as 25% of their capacity and range at 15,000 miles. Nissan has been replacing those batteries with new ones while they investigated the issue to find the root cause.

Since everything from the display of range and SOC is based on these faulty calculations, everything indicated that the battery was going bad fast. Nissan indicated that they knew something was wrong, that these batteries should not be going south as fast as they indicated, and analysis showed that indeed that in some situations the BMC was providing incorrect data.

Every owner of a 2016 or 2017 LEAF should contact their local dealer to get this fix applied to their vehicles, even if they have had their battery already replaced.

OrientExpress wrote:On June 6, 2018 Nissan began conducting a customer service campaign in North America to reprogram the lithium-ion battery controller in 2016 and 2017 model-year LEAF vehicles equipped with a 30 kWh battery, to correct the calculation used for the battery capacity level gauge and distance remaining of the vehicle...